Background

The Department of Education's Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE) is committed to helping adult educators learn about, understand, and put into practice the findings from research on how adults learn. Improving the quality of instruction in adult education programs involves continually strengthening the knowledge, skills, and abilities of instructors, administrators, and other adult education staff. There is an emerging and significant evidence-base to draw upon in designing, delivering and assessing instructional activities for adolescent and adult learners with diverse backgrounds and needs. Such activities include strategy instruction, self-regulated learning, differentiated instruction, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), effective lesson planning, and formative assessment. Available evidence suggests that these instructional activities are applicable to reading, writing, math, and English language instruction.

Overview

The American Institutes for Research (AIR), through contracts awarded by OVAE, has produced and field tested teacher materials, and will make them widely available beginning in 2013. In the first contract, (funded from September, 2009 through December 2012), the contract focused on the content area of writing instruction. State and local adult educators field tested professional development materials designed to help them understand and implement quality instructional practices, such as strategy instruction, self-regulated learning, differentiated instruction, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), effective lesson planning, and formative assessment. Twelve states participated including California, Florida, Idaho, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, and Wyoming.

The products and professional development materials produced in the first contract will be enhanced and produced for broad dissemination under a second contract awarded for the period of July, 2012 through July, 2015. Under this contract, the first six courses will be enhanced with further application strategies in the area of writing, and application strategies in the content area of mathematics will be added, utilizing the work of the Adult Numeracy Initiative-Professional Development model. Two additional courses on effective instructional strategies, drawn from the National Academy of Science report, will be produced. The project will also train and prepare instructors to facilitate the courses for States and local programs around the country.